Wèikèběn Yèshì yīàn 未刻本葉氏醫案
The Unprinted Manuscript of Yè’s Medical Case Records by 葉桂 Yè Guì 葉桂 (zì Tiānshì 天士, hào Xiāngyán 香岩, 1666–1745), of Sūzhōu 蘇州.
About the work
A two-juǎn manuscript casebook of Yè Tiānshì preserved in a wèikèběn 未刻本 (unprinted, manuscript) form — distinct from the redacted and printed Línzhèng zhǐnán yīàn KR3ep010 and the Yèshì cúnzhēn KR3ep079 — and circulated only in copies until the modern hxwd repatriation project recovered it from a Japanese medical-archive collection. The cases here are presented in their raw clinical form (without the editorial smoothing of the disciple-compilers of the Línzhèng zhǐnán) and constitute one of the most important documentary supplements to the systematic Yè Tiānshì casebook tradition.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt opens with a substantial preface that begins with the standard liángxiàng liángyī 良相良醫 (the shì should be either a good prime minister or a good physician) topos: “I have heard that the shì who is born into this age, if he is not a good prime minister, should be a good physician — because the good prime minister and the good physician can both rescue the worn-and-broken and the lame-and-disabled and cannot bear to sit by and watch their dejection without a word.” The preface insists that learning and discernment are equally required of both prime minister and physician — “Considering the famous physicians of old: without discernment, how could they have examined the depletion-and-fullness at the source of illness and brought the prescription into balance? Without learning, how could they have penetrated the subtlety of pulse-theory and held the essentials of the control of treatment?” — and then settles on Yè Tiānshì as the singular contemporary ideal: “Examining the elder Master Tiānshì Yè of Sūzhōu — he is one whose name actually corresponds to the reality, surely the worthy of his age. The old master is deeply versed in pulse theory and clearly perceives the source of illness; in his prescriptions he is especially able to be small of heart and bold of liver.” The preface celebrates Yè’s clinical reputation: “In his time, no near or far that came to him with disease was not received — there was not leisure in the day. The symptoms were many of strange and unusual sorts, and the prescriptions also fresh and original.” The preface establishes that this manuscript collection — though never put to print in the editor’s time — is the document of Yè’s actual clinical hand.
Abstract
Yè Guì 葉桂 (天士 Tiānshì, 香岩 Xiāngyán, 1666–1745, CBDB 65971) — the central figure of the eighteenth-century Sūzhōu wēnbìng synthesis — is treated in detail in the person note. The Wèikèběn Yèshì yīàn is one of three principal Yè casebooks (the others being KR3ep010 Línzhèng zhǐnán yīàn and KR3ep079 Yèshì yīàn cúnzhēn 葉氏醫案存真; see also KR3ep013 Xúpī Yè Tiānshì wǎnnián fāngàn zhēnběn 徐批葉天士晚年方案真本, KR3ep023 Méishòutáng fāngàn xuǎncún 眉壽堂方案選存, KR3ep027 Yè Tiānshì yīàn jīnghuá 葉天士醫案精華, and KR3ep063 Yè Tiānshì Cáo Rénbó Hé Yuáncháng yīàn 葉天士曹仁伯何元長醫案 — all of them late-Qīng and Republican-era recoveries and editions of fragments of Yè’s clinical record).
The cases of the Wèikèběn are dated internally to the years c. 1720–1745, the mature decades of Yè’s clinical practice. The work was preserved as a manuscript in Japanese medical libraries (a Tokugawa-era acquisition) and was not printed in China until its repatriation through the Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī gǔjí cóngshū project. The clinical material it preserves substantively complements the Línzhèng zhǐnán tradition.
Translations and research
For Yè Tiānshì see Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine (Routledge, 2011), and Hinrichs and Barnes 2013, pp. 196–203. No dedicated study of the Wèi-kè-běn specifically located.